“To say I’m sorry is inadequate,” I say. “But I am sorry. Deeply sorry.”
Squishy steps past the girl. She puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder and stares at me. Squishy’s gaze hasn’t changed. It’s still flat and dismissive.
Neither of us move for the longest moment. The air continues to buzz around us, like a circuit going bad. A child moves, rustling some leaves. A purplish scent fills the air, so strong that I have to hold back a sneeze.
“That’s it?” Squishy says. “That’s the apology?”
I nod.
“Then you can leave,” she says.
I take a deep breath. “I can,” I say. “But I shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t?”
The girl is looking up at Squishy again. The woman still hasn’t moved, but for a moment she doesn’t seem quite as solid as she had. I finally realize that she’s not real. She’s some sort of projection, maybe a part of the game the children were playing, maybe a holographic nanny, or maybe a low-tech security program, designed to chase intruders away just by her presence.
I make myself focus on Squishy’s voice. It’s as flat as her gaze. She doesn’t want to show any emotion. She’s being deliberately calm—too much so. Which is almost like showing emotion, to me anyway.
It shows me that she’s afraid of how she feels, afraid that if she lets those emotions loose they’ll be inappropriate to the place or the time. Or maybe she’s hiding emotions so strong that the only way to control them is to deny them.
I make myself take a deep breath. That thick scent gets caught in the back of my throat and I cough.
“Because of what I did with the Dignity Vessel,” I say.
“Because of what I forced you to do,” Squishy says.
The girl in front of her is frowning.
“No,” I say. “Because I found it, and we dived it …”
I can’t go on, not in front of the children. I have to censor what I was going to say about Jypé’s death, about Junior’s corpse.
I swallow against that tickle, wishing that smell would fade back.
“Because of the way I had us dive it,” I say, “I put some things into motion, things that I can’t take back. But I can stop those things, with your help.”
Squishy raises her chin slightly. Her expression doesn’t change. The girl watches her, but the other children watch me.
Finally Squishy sighs. “Come with me,” she says. “We’ll go somewhere private and talk.”
Somewhere private turns out to be a gazebo far from the house. The gazebo is on a ledge that extends over the valley below. Plants crawl up the gazebo’s walls and cover its roof.
The entire thing looks unstable to me—the ledge extending off the mountainside, and the plants covering the building like some kind of decay.
But the chairs inside are clean, and oddly, so is the floor. The gazebo has no windows—only archways completely open to the outside. Yet the interior is cool. A breeze that I hadn’t noticed near the house blows through here, and the shade is pleasant.
I don’t like standing in the sun.
Squishy stands at the farthest edge of the gazebo, the part that overhangs the valley, and clings to the wall.
I sit on some kind of couch that appears to be made of sturdy woven sticks. The sticks are painted white, and they look new.
The entire thing creaks as I move, yet I’m somehow confident in the couch’s sturdiness.
Squishy and I didn’t talk as we walked up the path. The girl wanted to come with us, and Squishy told her no. Squishy told her that she had to watch the other children.
The girl made a face, but she stayed behind.
A few of the other children followed, until Squishy turned on them and glared.
They ran back to the house, laughing. Apparently they had wanted that reaction.
The air doesn’t buzz here. The only noise comes from the creaking furniture, and the breeze, rustling the leaves on the plants.
I know so little about plants. I don’t know if these are native to Naha or if they are transplanted from Earth. Until I got here, I had no idea that plants could grow on buildings—or that people didn’t mind when the plants did.
“Somehow,” I say to break the silence, “this isn’t where I would have imagined you.”
“You’ve imagined me?” Squishy doesn’t turn around. She seems like Squishy and not like Squishy. The extra poundage on her is muscle, not fat, yet she doesn’t seem stronger to me. It seems like she softened, eased into life here, lost her edge.
“I think about you a lot,” I say. “I should have listened to you.”
“Yes,” she says. “You should have.”
I sigh. This isn’t going to be easy. I knew that when I came. However, I didn’t expect Squishy to make it even harder.
“Please,” I say. “Sit down. Let me tell you what happened.”
Finally, she turns around. “You mean something’s happened since the Dignity Vessel.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Way too much.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I tell Squishy everything. I leave nothing out.
I tell her about my father, about Riya Trekov, about the Room of Lost Souls.
She sits on a chair that matches the stick-woven couch. She has her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. The breeze plays with her hair. She looks like a woman who is listening politely to a story that has nothing to do with her.
Until I get to Karl.
Then she closes her eyes.
Just for a moment, but it’s long enough.
“So now,” she says before I finish, “you want revenge.”
Of course I want revenge. I dream of it sometimes, of going after my father, of shoving Riya Trekov into the Room of Lost Souls, then following her inside so that I can watch her die.
Yes, I want revenge.
But I’m smart enough to know I’ll never get it. Not really.
“I want to stop them,” I say.
“From taking others to the Room of Lost Souls?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I want to stop them from solving the mysteries of stealth tech.”
Squishy’s hands tighten. She leans forward. I have her attention now.
I tell her about the genetic markers. I tell her about the “designed” humans loose in the population. I tell her that the Empire now has several people who can work in stealth tech without dying.
She lets out a small breath.
“And,” she says as if this has been a conversation instead of a monologue, “they have working stealth tech.”
“Yeah,” I say. “The Room.”
“And the Dignity Vessel that I gave them,” she says.
“That we gave them,” I say.
She sighs. “What exactly do you want to do?”
“I don’t want them to have a breakthrough,” I say. “If the Empire gets stealth tech, they’ll be able to conquer the Nine Planets Alliance within weeks. At first, the Alliance won’t even know who’s attacking them.”
The Empire never made it to the Nine Planets in the last war. The distance was too far for the Empire to sustain. But the Colonnade Wars frightened the planets and they formed an alliance, planning to fight the Empire if it tried to overtake any of them.
The Alliance has kept the Empire out of this part of the sector so far. But stealth tech would change everything. The Empire could defeat one part of the Alliance before it ever had a chance to send for help.
“So give the Alliance some stealth tech,” Squishy says.
“And people with markers? And a way to create those markers?” I roll my eyes. “You make it sound like there are Dignity Vessels all over the sector.”
She just looks at me. I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. Finally, she sighs. “Why did you come to me?”